Tag Archives: Muslim holidays

Soeren Kern, writing for the Gatestone Institute in his November 16th article, “Islam Needs a Fair Chance in Germany,” reported a significant development in Germany that portends dire consequences for that benighted nation and for all of Europe: the city of Hamburg signed a “treaty” with organizations representing its Islamic population.

The “treaty” features a series of concessions, not by the Muslims to secular authority, but by the secular government of Hamburg to the Muslims. The “treaty,” which requires ratification by the city’s Parliament, grants Muslims “rights” and “privileges” enjoyed by no other religious group there.

The November 13 agreement, signed by Hamburg’s Socialist Mayor Olaf Scholz and the leaders of four Muslim umbrella groups, is being praised by the proponents of multiculturalism for putting the northern port city’s estimated 200,000 Muslims on an equal footing with Christian residents….

The most controversial part of the accord involves a commitment by the city government to promote the teaching of Islam in the Hamburg public school system. The agreement grants the leaders of Hamburg’s Muslim communities a determinative say in what will be taught by allowing them to develop the teaching curriculum for Islamic studies.

Moreover, Muslim officials will also be able to determine who will (and who will not) be allowed to teach courses about Islam in city schools. In practice, this means that only Muslims will be allowed to teach Islam and that pupils will not be exposed to any critical perspectives about the religious, social and political ideology of Islam.

Under the wide-ranging accord, Muslims in Hamburg will also have the right to take three Islamic holidays as days off from work. Up until now, it has been up to individual employers to decide whether or not to grant Muslim staff religious days off on a case-by-case basis. In addition, Muslim students will be exempt from attending school on Muslim holidays.

The agreement also includes provisions for the construction of more mosques in Hamburg, the upkeep of cultural Islamic facilities, the authorization for Muslims to bury their dead without the use of coffins, as well as the counseling of patients and prison inmates by Muslim clerics.

Moreover, the “treaty” will guarantee “broadcast slots alongside Protestant and Catholic broadcasts on public and private radio and television, as well as broadcasting council seats for Muslims with the northern Germany NDR public broadcaster and Germany’s federal ZDF television channel.”

The German term for treaty, vertag, occurs no less than five times in the article. It occurs in the document itself. In the article, the term agreement occurs fifteen times. But the actual document reads, in a loose English translation, “A Draft Treaty between the Islamic Community and the Municipal Authority of Hamburg.”

However, no matter how many times the term agreementappears in the article, a treaty is what the agreement is. Islam is on a cultural or civilizational jihad against the West and all Western institutions. So, what is a treaty? Is it a “truce” between the secular authorities and the religious Muslims? Is it a “non-aggression pact” between two powers vying for hegemony? Is it the granting to Muslims a “separate but equal” political status?

A treaty is commonly regarded as an agreement between belligerent nations, states, or governments. TheOxford English Dictionary defines treaty as:

3a. A settlement or arrangement arrived at by treating or negotiation; an agreement, covenant, compact, contract.

3b. spec. A contract between two or more states, relating to peace, truce, alliance, commerce, or other international relation; also, the document embodying such contract, in modern usage formally signed by plenipotentiaries appointed by the government of each state.

A treaty between belligerents indicates a cessation of hostilities between the parties. The Hamburg treaty implicitly acknowledges that its Muslim “communities” are part and parcel of the Islamic Ummah, or the worldwide, global “community” of Islam. The treaty has implicitly recognized the Ummah as a state to “treat” or “negotiate” with. So, the “agreement” is called a “treaty.” The German government has not been waging cultural or political jihad against Muslims; it is Muslims, especially those of Turkish origin in Germany, who have been waging all sorts of jihad against non-Muslim Germans in the way of rape jihad, jihad against freedom of speech, and jihad against Jews.

This is the situation in all European countries now, especially in the western European nations of Belgium, France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Across the Channel, Britain is succumbing to the same phenomena.

Out of a population of about 1.8 million in the city proper of Hamburg, Muslims of various sects, including the Alevi, a Turkish sect, constitute over nine percent.

Again, I think it is significant that this agreement is consistently called a treaty. It acknowledges that Islam has been at war with Western culture, and will continue to be until the “peace” of a global caliphate is achieved. For the time being, in Hamburg, its activists see a short-term gain in minimizing or playing down their necessary and constant hostility. In Islam, this is an instance of Dar al-Ahd, or a temporary truce. The “treaty,” from the Muslim perspective, is also necessarily an instance of what could be called “Grand Taqiyya,” or the Koranic sanctioning of lies and deceit when dealing with the enemy kaffirs and infidels, especially in their own countries.

But these “treaties” will turn out to be nothing but “truces,” when a movement is renewed to exact more concessions from the Germans. Call these “treaties” for what they are: fleeting “non-aggression pacts,” with Islam being the sole aggressor. Regardless of the nature or content of these treaties, Germany will remain Dar al-Harb, the land of the enemy, and Dar al-Kufr, or the land of the kaffirs or unbelievers. It is noteworthy that all the concessions will be paid by non-Muslim Germans as a form of jizya, or “protection” tax. Germans will not “retaliate” against Islamic aggression, for political correctness will silence them for fear of being accused of racism or bigotry.

Islam, however, is first and foremost, from top to bottom, a totalitarian ideology. Its doctrine requires that Muslims and their spokesmen advocate Islam’s own kind of racism and bigotry.

Islam is a nihilist ideology, as well. It is the enemy of all human values. In exchange for submission to it, it promises a paradise after death. Life on earth is merely transitory and not important. The Hamburg “treaty” is an extension of that nihilism; it requires its secular signers to aid and abet the piecemeal annihilation of their values and their culture. The Islamists know what they are doing. Their secular cosigners do not. It seems the “right” thing to do, per a Kantian categorical imperative to pursue an end regardless of, but especially because of, its selfless nature, in the name of what Mayor Scholz called “the strengthening the societal foundation” of Hamburg.

Which is tantamount to injecting the bubonic plague pathogen into a human body in order to “strengthen an individual’s well-being.”

Edward Cline is the author of the Sparrowhawk novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period, of several detective and suspense novels, and three collections of his commentaries and columns, all available on Amazon Books. His essays, book reviews, and other articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Journal of Information Ethics and other publications. He is a frequent contributor to Rule of Reason, Family Security Matters, Capitalism Magazine and other Web publications.